And sometimes people’s feelings are simply wrong. They are about politics, slavery, and hurting black people. As Julian Carr said when dedicating the Silent Sam statue:
[QUOTE=Julian Carr]
It is true that the snows of winter which never melt, crown our temples, and we realize that we are living in the twilight zone; that it requires no unusual strain to hear the sounds of the tides as they roll and break upon the other shore, “The watch-dog’s bark his deep bay mouth welcome as we draw near home”, breaks upon our ears—makes it doubly sweet to know that we have been remembered in the erection of this beautiful memorial. The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.
I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.
If there’s one defense I’ll offer for those who advocate keeping the monuments in place, it’s probably their way of saying, “Don’t call my ancestors evil. Don’t call the father of my grandfather an evil person, and don’t call my family evil.” And I’m sympathetic to that argument to a degree.
But the opponents of these monuments aren’t saying that, really. They’re not saying that these individuals were awful people (maybe some are but not all); rather, they’re just saying it’s time to wake up and remove tributes that were monuments to a society based on white supremacy. They belong in a history museum, but not in a public park. Their presence became normalized over time, so it’s understandable that some people would say “It never caused a problem before - why take them down now?” But that fact simply reveals the insidious nature of how racism and inequality can become embedded within society to the point where nobody even notices it anymore. Racism and inequality more broadly should always be noticed.
When Genghis Khan is celebrated in Mongolia, does it mean that torture, cruelty, constant warfare and eradication of whole cities has “become embedded” within the Mongolian society?
Whan Napoleon is celebrated in France, does that mean that expansionistic warfare has “become embedded” within the French Society? Should Arc de Triomphe be taken down?
A matter can be the “will of the people” in Town A regardless of whether it’s also the “will of the people” in Town B, or in Towns C-Z. I see no relevance in a poll that runs the gamut from A to Z if the question of each statue is local to each town.
When these statues come down, aside from the ones physically pulled down by protesters, they’re coming down because the local government decides to take them down. Whether nationally people want that particular statue or not, the local people who are in charge of that statue ultimately make the decision.
There’s also the problem that many state legislatures have recently taken that power out of the hands of the local people.
The local people of Charlottesville decided that the statue of Lee should be removed and sold to a private part, but that didn’t happen because the action is tied up in court because it might violate a recently passed Virginia state law protecting confederate memorials.
In Durham, North Carolina a statue was recently torn down in what was without a doubt an act of vandalism. However, there was no way for the people of Durham to legally remove that statue because of a recently passed North Carolina state law protecting confederate memorials.
In Birmingham, Alabama the mayor is being sued by the state attorney general for building a wooden box around a confederate memorial on city property. He couldn’t just have the statue removed because of a recently passed Alabama state law protecting confederate memorials.
You actually do raise a fair question or two: How are these different? How far is too far? These are not always easy questions to answer, and I am probably not in a good position to debate the merits of every single example, given that I have less familiarity with the history of France and Ghengis Khan’s Mongol Empire. That is something that people in these societies have to determine for themselves. If you ask me whether I would object to the removal of these statues, no, I wouldn’t. If later French and Mongolian people decided that they wanted to stop glorifying military conquerors, I would be okay with that. But that’s not a question I can answer for them. And a significant difference that I can already see is that there are very few, if any, people alive today who are impacted directly by their legacy, other than the fact that they live in maps that have been redrawn over time.
With respect to racist and ethnic nationalism, these are ideologies that have had an impact on people in the recent past, impact people now, and have the capability of affecting people in the future. These ideologies are alive, and from the looks of it, they are growing. They must be controlled. I would agree that removing statues and symbols by itself doesn’t eradicate racism, but it does reinforce the message that society as a whole finds these ideas unacceptable. By preserving these symbols, it sends the opposite message, which is that it’s just something that we should all acknowledge as a fact of life and be indifferent to it.
What is the defense for having such a monument? According to wkipedia, the scholarly consensus is that it was the court’s worst decision ever.
I’m loving these monument removals because they are faciitating more learning than the monuments ever did. I’m betting that most of the people gnashing their teeth over these things being taken down don’t even know what the Dred Scott decision was and how horrible it was, in both a legal sense and moral sense. Now people are learning and hopefully understanding what the fuss is all about.
No. It does mean that Mongolians can have pride that one of their own, starting from nothing, created the largest empire the world has ever seen, and one of the longest-lived. The later generations of Mongol rulers did quite a bit more than pillage and rapine, btw.
Similar answer, except that even Napoleon wasn’t about mass murder for the sake of obtaining subjugation through terror, and his looting was more personal cherry-picking than wholesale. Much of what he did are things to be proud of, even if you’re not French.
If your point is that the leaders the monuments are for were all human and complex, well, of course.
Celebrating columbus’s achievements is a touch controversial, for reasons listed in that article. While it did work out for many of our ancestors, there were some who were harmed, and that should be acknowledged.
While columbus can be controversial, he is not being celebrated for the bad things he did, but rather the good. If not columbus, someone else would have made it here within decades or at least a century. It wasn’t columbus that made the journey possible, it was improvements in ship design. So, all the stuff that happened would have happened anyway, with or without him. Honoring the guy that actually made it happen, even if it happening was eventually inevitable, does make sense.
I don’t see any particular reason that such statues should come down, unlike those that intentionally celebrate slavery, but I don’t live in detroit.
If the citizens of detroit get together, and have a petition and a vote and all to democratically decide to remove the columbus statues, I would have no problem with that either.
What problem do you have with people exercising their democratic rights?
I think it’s important to focus on the specific types of behavior that we consider evil rather than writing off the character of the individual in its entirety. Nazis had an evil ideology for sure, and yet there were probably Nazis who were loving family men and women, good parents, good grandparents, caring neighbors and so forth. It’s probably more productive and more likely to produce a favorable outcome if we avoid passing a sweeping judgment on the character of Southerners as being either good or evil individuals. That only stiffens the resistance against tearing down the statues. It’s much easier to get someone to agree that their behavior was evil than it is to get them to agree that the father of their grandfather or great grandfather, whom people alive today might have known, were somehow evil people.
Bingo. They can privately deal with the mixture of good and evil in their ancestors however they want.
But if they choose to publicly honor the evil that their ancestors did, they should expect that both they and their ancestors will be publicly vilified. It’s only fitting.
They weren’t even fighting for that. The consequence of staying in the Union was that, if Lincoln got his way, every state added to the Union from 1861 on would be a free state. This would likely have brought slavery to an end altogether in two or three generations as free states outnumbered slave states, and would have gradually diminished the value of slaves in the meantime, as the lands worked by slaves gradually diminished in productivity.
So the South decided it was worth killing and dying to prevent the geographic restriction of slavery, and to prevent its eventual but far-off demise.
If one tries to justify the Confederacy, that’s quite a thing to be an apologist for. Even from the perspective of 1861.
For those of you who think that there is not a slippery slope and that of course right-minded folks can make a distinction between Confederate historical figures and our Founding Fathers, do I need to remind you that back in the '90s New Orleans was the city that scrubbed ALL names of slave-holders off their public schools? Including George Washington? Including a black founder of an orphanage? The policy makes no allowances for slave owners, regardless of their historical stature.
It would not surprise me in the least if today Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and next year Washington and Jefferson. Keep watching the news. You’ll see. Maybe not this year–but’s it’s coming.
Would that be a problem? Washington’s and Jefferson’s roles in history are established and available in countless books. It’s not there’s a critical need to name stuff after them as well.